Saturday, 11 May 2013

Norman Rockwell

...in gallery art or fine art... there is still this Huge Question Mark about whether or not Norman Rockwell is actually an artist (let alone an Artist) while it is taken
as a given that Jackson Pollock is An Artist. That's lunacy to me...

Norman Rockwell did a SATURDAY EVENING POST cover that has come to be
called "The Connoisseur" (he didn't title his own works) of a well
dressed gentleman standing in an art gallery in front of a Jackson
Pollock style painting. Rockwell did all the research into how Pollock
did his pictures and worked very hard to "do" Pollock (doing the
spatters with the same arcing arm movement, shortened up because the
"painting" was inset in his own picture). He went to Paris in the 1920s
to try to participate in the art renaissance that was going on and was
summarily rejected as a non-artist, old fashioned, etc. I'm sure Pollock
never referred to him or the cover except in deprecating terms.

He was always open to all forms of art. He preferred his own
discipline (obviously) and he certainly never rested on his laurels --
at least up to the last years, each picture got better and better and
more and more difficult to execute -- even as he was being dismissed by
the Art World and even more troubling by the Commercial Art World at the
end of his life.

A highly placed executive at the Rockwell Museum told me that she
had been at SVA some years ago -- the School of Visual Arts, for crying
out loud! -- and Rockwell wasn't so much as mentioned.

And yet he's far and away the most beloved American artist of his own or any generation.

And, to me, the greatest painter of all time... inside or outside of America.